Monday, March 21, 2011

Paul Shaffer says in the interview (video below), that Jerry Seinfeld wanted him to play the role of George on the hit show Seinfeld. He received a message from Castle Rock Productions (actually Castle Rock Entertainment), Rob Reiner's company, from Jerry Seinfeld asking him to play the part as his sidekick in a new series.

Shaffer didn't recognize Seinfeld's name so never answered the message.

It's not that Shaffer hasn't done well for himself as David Letterman's musical sidekick, but missing out on Seinfeld is sort of like being the fifth Beatle.

How quickly things change. Just months ago U.S. President Obama, Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi and French president Sarkozy, among others, were engaged in photo ops cozying up to the seemingly insane despot Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Not such a bad guy after all it seems. Flash forward. Now they are happily bombing his country in what appears to be essentially a civil war. We can get caught up in the terminology: popular uprising, revolt, civil war, tribal conflict – all are true descriptions – yet essentially the west is becoming embroiled in what is an internal matter within a sovereign state. There seems to be no rush for the west to intervene in Bahrain who have brought Saudi forces in to help them with their 'crisis' and have been firing on their unruly citizens.

Absent among the interveners rs are the Arab states. They seem not to be rushing in to help depose Gaddafi.

This is not surprising given that these states themselves are ruled in much the same manner Libya is. The United Nations have 192 nation members, yet only a handful of the trusty western democracies are involved in the assault on Libya. Where are the rest?

If the west is truly interested in intervening in civil clashes and preventing slaughter, one only has to look at the dismal record in Africa to understand that that intervention on the continent is largely inept and ineffective, when it happens at all.

This is a sad and desperate time in Libya, yet it's not up to the U.S. and its allies to pick a side in a civil war. If Gaddafi had asked the U.S. to help him impose the rule of law in Libya, it's inconceivable that they would intercede. It's called choosing sides, and while we can cheer from the sidelines, we need to let the Libyans choose for Libya.

It's getting tough to keep up with all the unrest in the Middle East an North Africa. CNN had put together this excellent interactive map that give you the key news. Click on the map to go to the interactive version on CNN.

No free drinks from Starabucks for Riffat Qureshi. Qureshi, 36, married mother of four, doctor and self-described as a "professional model" claims she was doused with boiling water which scalded her belly when a Starbucks barista in New York slid the drink across the counter, shouting, "Catch the cup."

Starbucks says Qureshi is faking her injuries and that the woman's physician testified that he diagnosed her with a rash and skin infection. Either way, this is great material. The model, the doctor, the scalding coffee and the "Catch the cup" line. I'm proposing this one for a sitcom to NBC.

Now it's all clear to me. I wasn't the booze and drugs that got to Sammy – it was the aliens. Former Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar believes his brain was taken over by aliens. Hagar, who is flogging his new book "Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock" dropped the A-word during an interview on MTV. Hagar admits this just might make him "sound like a crazy person" to some readers.

In the interview he was talking about dreams he claims to have had about UFOs when the reporter asked whether he believed he had been abducted. Hagar answered: "I think I have."

"It was real," Hagar said, according to MTV's Hive website. "They were plugged into me. It was a download situation ... or, they uploaded something from my brain, like an experiment."

"This was long before computers or any kind of wireless. There weren’t even wireless telephones. Looking back now, it was like, “Fuck, they downloaded something into me!” Or they uploaded something from my brain, like an experiment. “See what this guy knows.”

We are likely safe from alien attack for the moment, since they decided there was no intelligent life on earth after connecting with Sammy.